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chabala/using-google-takeout.md

Last active October 8, 2025 09:26
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  1. chabala revised this gist Sep 18, 2022. 1 changed file with 7 additions and 0 deletions.
    7 changes: 7 additions & 0 deletions using-google-takeout.md
    View file
    Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
    @@ -11,3 +11,10 @@ $ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-*.tgz | tar xzivf -
    ```

    `tar` has been around forever, they didn't design it to need custom scripts to deal with multipart archives. Since it's extracting the combined archive, there's no 'mess of partial directories' to be merged. It just works, as intended.

    An additional tip, courtesy of Dmitriy Otstavnov (@bvc3at): if you have `pv` available, you can track the progress of the extraction:

    ```shell
    > pv takeout-* | tar xzif -
    190GiB 2:37:54 [18.9MiB/s] [==============> ] 30% ETA 5:03:49
    ```
  2. chabala created this gist Oct 27, 2020.
    13 changes: 13 additions & 0 deletions using-google-takeout.md
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    @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
    Recently found some clowny gist was the top result for 'google takeout multiple tgz', where it was using two bash scripts to extract all the tgz files and then merge them together. Don't do that. Use brace expansion, `cat` the TGZs, and extract:

    ```console
    $ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-{001..011}.tgz | tar xzivf -
    ```

    You don't even need to use brace expansion. Globbing will order the files numerically:

    ```console
    $ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-*.tgz | tar xzivf -
    ```

    `tar` has been around forever, they didn't design it to need custom scripts to deal with multipart archives. Since it's extracting the combined archive, there's no 'mess of partial directories' to be merged. It just works, as intended.